Tag: Time

On the artist On Kawara

I was not aware of On Kawara until recently, and so I went down a rabbit hole reading as much as I could about him, as well as taking in whatever art I could find online. The following links I found helpful if you want to know more about this artist:

Thoughts I had:

  • To me he seems a fine combination of minimalism and conceptualism. That some of his earlier work was related to  minimalist Agnes Martin was also interesting.
  • While time is the focus of many of his work, secondary ideas come from that, such as scale and precision. Even location is there in the painting.
  • While the Date Paintings are minimal to the point of looking mechanical, they are actually produced by hand. Indeed there was significant effort by the artist to make one of the Date paintings.
  • Perhaps they could have been even more minimal by only using black and white, but there are color choices made for the paintings,  reflecting the part of the painter.
  • Like other conceptualists, Kawara had rules for his work, For example, “When Kawara was unable to complete the painting on the day it was started he immediately destroyed it.”

As someone fascinated by time and how it is measured and what that signifies, I was intrigued by the work of Kawara. If that appeals to you too, check him out.

Waste is a failure of imagination, and other thoughts on waste

Waste is a failure of imagination. Woodworkers know that especially. Good wood workers will try and minimize waste by designing their cuts to use as much of their raw material as possible, and then they will try and use up the remains in one way or another.

We should be like good woodworkers, using our imaginations, our minds, to come up with new uses for things we consider waste. During the pandemic we even depended on our wastewater to tell us how we were doing. Even that kind of waste can be useful.

Not all waste is material. Waste can also be temporal: we talk about wasting our time and wasting our life. Here too, we should consider ways to minimize such waste. And not just by being busy all the time. Being idle is not always a waste of time: idleness can be often be necessary. Just as being busy without a purpose can be a great waste of time.

What is important is the context. How we spend our time — idle, busy, something else — and whether or not it is a waste depends on the context we have of it. So, doing nothing with someone you love is a good use of your time, just like working hard on a project no one wants could be a waste of time.

These are some of the recent thoughts I had on waste when I read this post: No such thing as waste, by Austin Kleon. I recommend it.

I’ve written often about waste here on smart people I know. Recently I talked about it, here, when I was futzing around with code. Then there is this piece, on how Waste = failure to innovate. More on time and waste: Focus on maximizing your time instead of worrying about the time you waste. I even wrote on love and waste: On the love we waste.

If that isn’t enough, here’s all the time I touched on waste on this blog. Quite a lot. None of it was a waste, though.

Being happy is simple, not easy. Or, the unsurprising daily habits of happiness experts


TIME recently surveyed a range of happiness experts to discover their happiness habits. Here’s the list of habits they mostly did daily and weekly:

  • Get seven or more hours of sleep a night
  • Personal hobby (art, writing, music, cooking, reading, gaming)
  • Exercise / play sports
  • Spend time in nature
  • Meditate
  • Spend time with friends outside of office/professional setting
  • Spend time with family outside of household
  • Engage with support groups or therapist
  • Pray

Simple, yes? Not easy, though. The not easy part comes in because one of the common themes for each habit is Spend Time. How you choose to allocate your time makes a key difference in how happy we are. Sometimes you don’t even have a choice. Responsibilities and obligations can rob you of choices. Such theft, leaves you with little time to buy your happiness.

Try and guard your time as best as you can. Then spend it on yourself and your happiness. You deserve it.

P.S. Here is the TIME piece: The Daily Habits of Happiness Experts, It provides more detail.

P.S.S. Will doing all these things guarantee your happiness? No, of course not. Good happiness habits are to happiness what good exercise habits are to fitness: they will work for many people, but not all. Like with any advice on the Internet, if it’s not working for you, see a professional or an expert and get the help you need.

It’s Monday. The best time management tool you have is the word “No”

I was reading this piece, Time Management Won’t Save You, and thinking about it a lot. Some of it I agreed with, other parts of it I thought dumb. However, I did do some thinking after I read this:

In all of these instances, the solution isn’t to become more efficient to accommodate more tasks, more decisions, and more distractions. The imperative is clear: simplify. Reduce the number of tasks you take on, replace decisions with principles, and put structure in place to eliminate distractions.

He is arguing that the goal is simplifying. I agree. But I would be more assertive: if you have too much to do, the goal is to say “no”. You have to say “no” to many things in order to say “yes” to the things that matter. Saying “no” gives you more time to do the things you need to do.

You might find saying “no” hard, but you are doing it all the time. If you choose one task to work on over another, you are saying yes to one and no to the other. If you interview 5 people for a job, you have to say no to the others. It goes on and on.

Part of the reason we think saying “no” is hard is because it implies a judgment on what you said no to. For example, if I hire one person over 4 others, it doesn’t mean the people I don’t hire are bad. It means the person I hired is the best fit for this particular job. If I buy a medium size shirt, it doesn’t mean the large shirt and the small shirt are bad: it means the medium fit best. That’s all.

Likewise sometimes we say “no” when we really mean “not now”. For example, I love chocolate cake, but I might say “no” to it because I am full. I still love the cake, it just isn’t the right time for it.

Indeed, if you find say “no” hard, try “not right now” or  “not this week ” or “not until my next review period”.

Saying “no” is like weeding your garden. Weeds aren’t bad: some are beautiful. But your focus is on what you are trying to grow. That’s all you are saying with the weeding you do. Likewise, that is all you are doing when you are saying “no”. You are maintaining your focus in order to have the best outcome.

Go through all the things taking up your focus. Dump most of them into your “no/not now” list. Enjoy the time you now have to do the things that matter most.

(Photo by Daniel Herron on Unsplash )

The Twenty Minute Rule you need to manage your time

 


A smart approach to managing your time is allocating no more than 20 minutes to any task you need to do.  So says this: Everything should take 20 minutes | The Outline. 

The reasoning in a nutshell:

Think about a task you wish to or must complete, and imagine how long it should take you. If you are a right-thinking person like myself, the answer is “20 minutes.” A 10-minute task is hardly a task at all, more of a minor interruption, and anything that takes 30 minutes invites the thought that you could have watched a half-hour episode of television instead. Twenty minutes is, objectively, the ideal amount of time — the Goldilocks number when it comes to doing things.

Now you can quibble about it, but it’s a smart rule. If you are still unsure, read the piece.

How many days until….

Clock
If you want a simple way to determine how many days until a certain date, or have a count down clock on your screen, consider the web site days.to. If you go to that link, you can see all the things you can do with the site. If you want to determine how many dates until a certain date, enter https://days.to/dd-month/year. For example, if you want to know how many days until January 1, 2020, enter: https://days.to/1-january/2020

Great little site!

How IBM Watson helped Time magazine narrow its search for Person of the Year 

Interesting article: How IBM Watson helped Time magazine narrow its search for Person of the Year (IT Business)

From a technology point of view, it is also interesting that the IBM partner was using IBM’s Watson and Bluemix technologies.

I am biased here, as someone who works for IBM and believes in these technology, but I do think that if you think A.I. and cognitive doesn’t have a place in your business, you should read this. In the next two years, expect all your competitors to adopt these new technologies to compete with you.